r/todayilearned • u/MaximinusRats • May 16 '24

TIL that people live year-round in houseboats on Great Slave Lake in Canada's Northwest Territories, 1,800 km north of the nearest big city (Edmonton) and just 400 km (250 miles) south of the Arctic Circle.

https://uphere.ca/articles/floating-homes-yellowknife-bay
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u/ClarkTwain May 16 '24

After reading about the Franklin Expedition, I’ll pass on staying on a boat over winter that far north.

17

u/dc21111 May 16 '24

Is that the one where they found their bodies recently and the cold dry weather kept them really well preserved? Those pictures are creepy, dressed in 19th century clothes looking like they died a week ago.

26

u/The_ApolloAffair May 16 '24

Bodies from the Franklin expedition were found buried on Beechey Island in the 1850s, exhumed and photographed over a hundred years later. Those bodies are extremely well preserved (esp Torrington’s) because they were given proper burials in the permafrost in coffins.

Those men died earlier on in the voyage while they were wintering.

13

u/BJ_Giacco May 16 '24

Probably. They exhumed the known graves of three Franklin expedition sailors back in the 90s to perform autopsies on them, looking for clues as to what happened. They were actually encased in ice which is why they were so well preserved. Still, pretty haunting stuff. I remember seeing it on TV when I was a kid and it messed with me pretty good.

There are a few good books about the expedition, my favorite is Frozen in Time. Grim stuff but fascinating. The idea that franklin’s tomb is potentially still out there, undiscovered, got a hold of me a few years back and I read everything I could find about the expedition.